A federal appeals court on March 26 reversed a lower court decision, ruling that an Ohio professor’s First Amendment rights may have been violated when his university tried forcing him to refer to a biological male student using female pronouns.
A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said philosophy professor Nicholas Meriwether “has plausibly alleged that Shawnee State violated his First Amendment rights by compelling his speech or silence and casting a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”
Shawnee State University, in Ohio, has employed Meriwether for 25 years.
The case centers around a 2016 rule change that requires faculty to refer to students by their “preferred pronoun[s].”
When Meriwether, a Christian, sought clarification on the rule, a university official claimed that Christians are “primarily motivated out of fear” and should be “banned from teaching courses regarding that religion.” She also said she thought even the “presence of religion in higher education is counterproductive.”
Two years later, on the first day of his class, Meriwether was using the Socratic method to lead a discussion and addressed, as he normally does, students using gender references like “Mr.” He called one person “sir,” not knowing the biological male identifies as a female.
After class, the individual approached Meriwether and demanded the professor refer to him as a she and use feminine titles and pronouns. Meriwether said he wasn’t sure he could and was threatened in response, according to court filings.
The situation escalated as various officials got involved. The professor’s attempt to reach a compromise—he offered to use the preferred pronoun, but would place a disclaimer in his syllabus noting that he was doing so under compulsion—was rejected, and he was ultimately reprimanded, receiving a written warning. A union appeal failed, dismissed by Provost Jeffrey Bauer, who allegedly “openly laughed” when the union representative tried to explain why Meriwether felt conflicted because of his faith.
Circuit Judge Amul Thapar, a George W. Bush nominee, writing for the appeals court panel, said that not only had the professor plausibly alleged a First Amendment violation, it violated his religious rights guaranteed in the free exercise clause.
Officials at the university exhibited hostility to Meriwether’s religious beliefs, and “irregularities in the university’s adjudication and investigation processes permit a plausible inference of non-neutrality,” Thapar wrote.
The panel also affirmed the lower court’s ruling in several other claims that the professor had made. The case was remanded to the lower court with instructions to conduct further proceedings consistent with the new ruling.
The university didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
John Bursch, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, who represented Meriwether, said in a statement that “nobody should be forced to contradict their core beliefs just to keep their job.”
“We are very pleased that the 6th Circuit affirmed the constitutional right of public university professors to speak and lead discussions, even on hotly contested issues. The freedoms of speech and religion must be vigorously protected if universities are to remain places where ideas can be debated and learning can take place,” he said.
Former President Donald Trump’s social media platform will debut in three to four months, according to Corey Lewandowski, a former senior adviser with Trump’s 2020 campaign.
Lewandowski, in an interview with Newsmax aired on March 27, described the platform as “an interactive communication tool whereby the president is going to be able to post things that people will be able to report and communicate directly with him.
“What we’ve seen from Big Tech and the cancel culture is if you don’t agree with their philosophy, they’re going to cancel you, and we’re going to have a platform where the president’s message of America First is going to be able to be put out to everybody and there’ll be an opportunity for other people to weigh in and communicate in a free format without fear of reprisal or being canceled,” he said.
The new platform won’t rely on Amazon or Amazon servers, Lewandowski said in response to a question on what is being done to insulate Trump’s social media from suffering the same fate as Parler. That site had billed itself as a free-speech alternative to Twitter before it was simultaneously deplatformed by Amazon, Apple, and Google.
“It’s going to be built completely from scratch, from the ground up, and that’s going to give him the opportunity to control not only the distribution of it but also who participates in it,” Lewandowski said.
Lewandowski said that the former president has been working on the platform for “a long time.”
Jason Miller, a current Trump adviser, said last week that the president will soon set up a platform that will “completely redefine the game” and attract “tens of millions” of users.
Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook following the Jan. 6 incident at the U.S. Capitol, cutting a direct line of communication between the commander-in-chief and tens of millions of his followers. Both companies alleged that the president’s messages could incite violence. The U.S. Congress later exonerated Trump on similar charges brought by Democrats.
Since then, a number of world leaders have expressed concern over the censorship. Twitter has said that its ban is permanent, while Facebook is deliberating whether to restore access to the former president.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) recently said he was “uncomfortable” with Twitter removing Trump and cautioned that people with a different view from Trump’s could be banned as well.
“Bernie Sanders, and I don’t agree with him very often, but he’s absolutely right. When you can cancel the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, from issuing First-Amendment rights and opinions then you can cancel anybody,” Lewandowski said. “Big Tech is out of control. They’re out of line.”
Kaylee Samantha, 7, who said she came alone from Mexico, gets off of a small inflatable raft onto U.S. soil after being delivered by a smuggler in Roma, Texas, on March 24, 2021. (Dario Lopez-Mills/AP Photo) Immigration & Border Security
The number of immigrant children in U.S. custody grew by over 1,500 in just two days, according to newly released federal data.
Just over 18,000 minors who illegally crossed the southern border of the United States without a parent or guardian were in the custody of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as of March 25.
Roughly 5,500 were in CBP custody. That’s where children go initially after being apprehended, before being transferred to HHS.
The number of children in U.S. custody was 16,513 as of March 23.
America is dealing with a surge in illegal border crossings, as well as a sharp increase in the number of young immigrants arriving without responsible adults. Experts have told The Epoch Times that the rise is due to President Joe Biden rolling back key Trump-era policies, such as stopping the policy of sending unaccompanied minors back to their home countries.
“It’s driven by Biden’s rhetoric, his rollback of Trump administration restrictions at the border,” Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Epoch Times earlier this month.
“I think the real question is, why are they doing this?” added James Carafano, vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute, in a recent interview. “And you could argue it’s actually a deliberate policy that they’re actually seeking to attract illegal aliens into the United States.”
To deal with the influx in minors, the administration has reached deals to convert three convention centers into holding facilities and opened at least five other locations to house the aliens.
A group of illegal aliens is apprehended by Border Patrol after crossing from Mexico into Yuma, Ariz., on April 12, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
The 12,551 children in HHS care is the most since June 2019, the tail end of another surge. The number dipped as low as 834 last year, after the Trump administration utilized Title 42 to expel the majority of immigrants because they might be carrying the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19.
Under U.S. law, CBP is supposed to transfer immigrant children to HHS within 72 hours of their apprehension.
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said Friday during an MSNBC appearance that he’s been told some young girls have been at the CBP’s Donna, Texas, holding facility for more than 20 days.
“I asked HHS why, and they said ‘well, we just don’t have the capacity now to take the young girls.’ They take, for example, in Carrizo Springs, young boys from ages 13 and 17,” he said. “They are scrambling at HHS to find a place, a center, so they can take the young girls there.”
White House officials have repeatedly said that immigrants shouldn’t travel to the border but insisted that their policy of not fully utilizing Title 42 powers is more humane than that of the previous administration.
Biden’s “focus is on moving these kids out of these Border Patrol facilities and making sure it’s done in a way that keeps them safe and keeps everyone safe,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in Washington Friday.
“We’ve dealt with this before. It is often seasonal. It is often cyclical,” she added.
U.S. Attorney John Durham speaks to reporters on the steps of U.S. District Court in New Haven, Conn., on April 25, 2006. (Bob Child/AP Photo) Crossfire Hurricane
Former President Donald Trump on March 26 questioned the progress of the investigation by special counsel John Durham into the origins of the Russia investigation and the conduct of the government officials involved.
“Where Durham? Is he a living, breathing human being? Will there ever be a Durham report?” Trump wrote in a statement released by his office.
Durham is purportedly investigating a broad range of issues tied to the surveillance of the Trump campaign by the FBI. The investigation has so far led to the sentencing of a former FBI attorney who forged an email used in the process of obtaining a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The FBI spied on Page over the course of a year beginning in October 2016. An investigation by the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (OIG) determined that the four FISA applications used to surveil Page contained 17 major errors and omissions implicating every official involved in the process, including then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Acting Director Andrew McCabe, and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, among many others.
Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in New York on Aug. 21, 2020. (Brendon Fallon/The Epoch Times)
The findings by the OIG prompted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue a severe rebuke to the FBI, questioning why the bureau should ever be trusted with surveillance applications. The FBI has since committed to major reforms in how it vets the information used in FISA applications.
A dossier of unverified claims about Trump played a major role in the FBI’s decision to obtain the first FISA warrant on Page. All of the FISA applications contained claims from the dossier without disclosing that it was composed by a former foreign spy and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The bureau also failed to disclose that the dossier’s author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, had an overt bias against Trump and was determined to prevent Trump’s election in 2016.
Steele’s sentiments didn’t differ much from some of the key FBI officials running the investigation of the Trump campaign, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane. The agent who opened and led the investigation, Peter Strzok, exchanged messages with his extramarital mistress at the FBI, attorney Lisa Page, expressing hatred for Trump and disdain for his supporters. Strzok spoke about stopping Trump from becoming president, discussed an “insurance policy” in the unlikely event Trump was elected president and mused about impeachment around the time he joined then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
More than a dozen top FBI and Justice Department officials involved in Crossfire Hurricane have either resigned or been fired.
The Epoch Times sent Durham a request for comment.
Dr. Bandy Lee, who previously worked as an affiliated faculty member in the psychiatry department of Yale’s medical school, on Monday filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the university, reported student newspaper the Yale Daily News. She demands reinstatement and compensation for damages, including “economic losses” and “emotional distress.”
Lee has been questioning the mental health of Trump since 2017, when she became the editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” a New York Times best seller in which a group of 27 medical professionals claimed that Trump was mentally unfit for his job. The book caused controversy at the time, since it broke a long-standing ethical standard known as the “Goldwater Rule,” which states that psychiatrists should never provide professional opinions in the media about public figures they have not personally examined.
In 2018, Lee was called by House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) to a congressional hearing, where she laid out to lawmakers why she believed Trump had became mentally unstable to the point that he should be involuntarily committed to a hospital mental health program.
The lawsuit, however, mostly centers around Lee’s social media speech. According to court filings obtained by the Yale Daily News, Lee is alleging that Yale fired her in response to a Twitter post she made in January 2020, which characterized “just about all” of Trump supporters as suffering from “shared psychosis” and said that Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer on Trump’s legal team, had “wholly taken on Trump’s symptoms by contagion.”
Dershowitz refuted Lee’s claim, and wrote an email to Yale administrators over the psychiatry professor’s breaking of the Goldwater Rule and demanding she be disciplined.
“Dr. Bandy Lee of the Yale Medical School has publicly ‘diagnosed’ me as ‘psychotic,’ based on my legal and political views, and without ever examining or even meeting me,” Dershowitz wrote in the letter. “This constitutes a serious violation of the ethics rules of the American Psychiatric Association. I am formally asking that association to discipline Dr. Lee. By this email, I also formally ask Yale University, Yale Law School and its medical school to determine whether Dr. Lee violated any of its rules.”
According to court documents, Dershowitz’s complaint led the the psychiatry department leadership to warn Lee that she should stop making similar public statements, otherwise the department “would be compelled to terminate [her] teaching role.” Lee continued to write on Twitter about Trump’s mental stability even after the official warning.
Lee was fired in September 2020, with a psychiatry department letter explaining that the decision was mainly due to her “clinical judgement and professionalism,” rather than the “political content” of her statements.
“I have done this with a heavy heart, only because Yale refused all my requests for a discussion, much as the American Psychiatric Association has done,” Lee wrote in an email to the Yale Daily News. “I love Yale, my alma mater, as I love my country, but we are falling into a dangerous culture of self-censorship and compliance with authority at all cost.”
Yale University didn’t immediately respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comments.
Unaccompanied minors are loaded into a U.S. Border Patrol transport van after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, in Hildalgo, Texas, on March 25, 2021. (John Moore/Getty Images) Executive Branch
President Joe Biden’s administration is going to use a third convention center to house illegal immigrant youth.
The Freeman Expo Center in San Antonio is being converted to an Emergency Intake Center for children who cross the southern border without their parents.
Up to 2,400 kids can be housed at the facility, according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
“The Emergency Intake Site will provide ORR with needed capacity to accept children from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) into its care where they can be safely processed, cared for and either released to a sponsor or transferred to an appropriate ORR shelter for longer-term care. The Emergency Intake Site is intended for use as a temporary measure,” the agency said in a statement obtained by The Epoch Times.
The administration has already reached deals to house up to 1,400 immigrant youth in the San Diego Convention Center and up to 2,300 youth in the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center in Dallas.
Additionally, officials have opened at least five other locations to hold the children, and the Pentagon accepted requests to keep thousands of youth at Fort Bliss and another several hundred at Joint Base San Antonio Lackland. In total, ORR operates over 200 facilities and programs in 22 states. There’s also a plan to send illegal immigrant families to hotels, with taxpayers footing the bill.
Bexar County’s manager didn’t immediately return an inquiry. Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, asked about facilities possibly being used to house immigrants, told reporters on Tuesday that no agreement had been reached yet.
“We do have facilities there. They’re climate control. They’re large. But we are talking about, how will we handle security? Who would be the food provider, who will actually be managing the place? It’d be pretty much our job to, if we do it, to coordinate with them and to make the space available, but no agreements been reached yet. We’re just now talking about a possible contract,” he said.
The United States saw a jump in illegal border crossings in February, including an increase of over 3,600 unaccompanied minors from the month before. Officials have struggled to deal with the increase, with overcrowded conditions in Border Patrol facilities exposed through leaked photographs.
An overflow facility in Donna, Texas, in an undated photo. (Courtesy of Rep. Henry Cuellar’s office)
Biden’s administration stopped expelling youth who cross into the country, a reversal of the Trump era utilization of Title 42 powers to send them back to their home countries. The powers are used in a bid to prevent COVID-19 from entering the country through immigrants.
Biden told reporters in Washington that under the previous administration, unaccompanied children would “starve to death” after being expelled from the country.
“No previous administration did that either, except Trump. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it,” he added.
Stephen Miller, a top immigration adviser to Trump, called the accusation “spectacularly false” and “a grave smear on our border agents.”
Illegal border crossers were returned to Mexico and unaccompanied youth were returned to their countries of origin to be reunited with their families, Miller wrote on Twitter.
“This humane policy from President Trump brought unaccompanied minor numbers to record lows. Biden’s disastrous decision to exempt minors from Title 42, and to stop the at-home reunification process in favor of domestic resettlement, single-handedly created this crisis,” he wrote.
A reporter had referenced a 9-year-old boy who claimed to have traveled without adults to the United States from Honduras. The reporter said they reached the boy’s mother by phone. She said she sent her son to America because she believed Biden’s administration isn’t deporting unaccompanied minors.
Biden asserted some youth will ultimately be deported. “The judgment has to be made whether or not—and in this young man’s case, he has a mom at home; there’s an overwhelming reason why he’d be put in a plane and flown back to his mom,” he said.
People should be concerned about the Green New Deal because it includes the most radical policies that can transform the economy into a socialist one and allow the government to tighten control over society, according to Hayden Ludwig, Senior Investigative Researcher at the Capital Research Center.
“The Green New Deal, I would say, has nothing to do with climate change, it has nothing to do with global warming, the environment. Period. It’s everything to do with remaking the entire United States in the radical left’s own image,” Ludwig told The Epoch Times’ “Crossroads” program.
Saikat Chakrabarti, former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), told The Washington Post in 2019, “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal … is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. … we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
A campaign organizer for Friends of the Earth stated at a United Nations conference, “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources,” according to Christopher Horner’s book “Red Hot Lies.”
The Democrats in the House of Representatives proposed an infrastructure package that would include roughly $1 trillion for roads, bridges, rail lines, electrical vehicle charging stations, and the cellular network, among other items. The stated goal is to facilitate the shift to cleaner energy while improving economic competitiveness.
A second component of the package would propose benefits for workers, including free community college, universal pre-kindergarten, and paid family leave.
“They published a proposal that was a sprawling proposal that pretended to be a highway bill. But it was really just a multi-thousand-page cousin of the Green New Deal,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said about the proposed package.
“We’re hearing the next few months might bring a so-called ‘infrastructure’ proposal that may actually be a Trojan horse for massive tax hikes and other job-killing left-wing policies,” McConnell said.
“If you read the text of [the Green New Deal] from a few years ago you’ll find references, fig leaves, to global warming that immediately jump into things they really want to talk about,” Ludwig said. “And that’s about ‘combating rising income inequality,’ and ‘environmental justice’, which really is a way to say ‘reparations to black and brown communities because they’ve been systematically oppressed by white communities’ and this has nothing to do with the environment.”
Ludwig explained that “environmental justice” is the Marxist concept of oppressor and oppressed applied to global warming. “Rich polluters, right, those are people who own houses, people who own multiple cars, who are by the nature of their pollution, oppressing the oppressed people, and these are poor people who live in poor communities, who are ethnic minorities,” he said. This way “any sort of sweeping redistribution, reparations agenda [can be justified] by pointing out it’s all climate-related,” Ludwig added.
Creating conflict between “the oppressor” and “the oppressed” is at the core of Marxist doctrine. “Marxists basically see the world in terms of one oppressor class oppressing an oppressed class and that used to be the capitalist class oppressing the proletariat, the labor class,” Ludwig said. “That didn’t really work out.”
The same dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed was applied to races like white people and black people or other non-white people, or men and women, Ludwig said.
Environmentalism Leads to Population Control
Environmentalists hold a protest march from the U.S. Capitol in Washington on April 29, 2017. (Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)
Ludwig said that “true environmentalism leads to population control.” He said that he drew this conclusion after tracing “the origins of environmentalism back to the eugenics movement and the pro-abortion movement—in short, the population control movement of the 20th century.”
The Green New Deal allows the federal government to justify policies that will control how people travel, how they eat, and how many children they have, Ludwig said. “That’s why this is so dangerous. It’s an open-ended mandate for the most radical transformation we’ve ever seen proposed.”
“There’s a reason, I think, why the Democratic Party is pushing so much radical environmental policy right now, as opposed to anything else, like Medicare For All, and my theory is that they realize that this is the fastest way to get the amount of power that they want over people’s lives,” he added. “If you can sell somebody on, ‘If you don’t pass this measure, you die, the whole world goes up in smoke,’ so to speak—if you can pass that, you can justify whatever you want.”
Traditional socialism, like in China, seeks power over everything people do and “environmentalism is the only ideology I know of that goes even more beyond that; it gives the government power of your very genes, over what you get to breathe out—I mean, cellular-level kind of control,” Ludwig said. “It’s the most extreme thing we’ve ever seen,”
Ludwig cited filmmaker and activist Michael Moore, who in his 2019 documentary “Planet of the Humans” pointed out that if one seriously considers saving the planet through stopping climate change, yet excludes carbon-free nuclear power as an option, as many environmentalists have, “then what you’re left with is minimizing the number of humans left on the planet,” Ludwig said. “There’s no other way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions short of massive population control schemes.”
“We have to be wary of these things because they will ultimately end in controlling how many children you can have,” Ludwig said, noting there are organizations that have been advocating these policies since the 1960s, such as Population Connection.
Population Connection was founded in 1968 under the name of Zero Population Growth (ZPG) with a mission to “raise public awareness of the link between population growth and environmental degradation and, in turn, encourage people to have smaller families” limited to two children, according to its website.
The organization changed its name in 2002, but its “mission never changed,” the website states. The name change allowed the organization to get access to Capitol Hill, public schools, and attract younger members and supporters.
Originally ZPG targeted the white middle class because “the white middle-class majority use up more than their share of resources and do more than their share of polluting,” Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies at Stanford University wrote in 1970 in the ZPG National Reporter. Later, the organization decided to extend its message to “the rich, the poor, and the middle class.”
In February, Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), with support from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I- Vt.), introduced The National Climate Emergency Act, which grants the president “enormous ability to respond to an emergency,” Ludwig wrote for Capital Research Center.
In January, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told MSNBC: “I think it might be a good idea for President Biden to declare a climate emergency. Then he can do many, many things under the emergency powers of the president that wouldn’t have to go through, that he could do without legislation.”
Solar panels are mounted atop the roof of the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, Calif. on Sept. 5, 2018. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Renewable energy sources such as wind turbines or solar panel arrays require an enormous amount of land, Ludwig said, adding that applying them on a large scale could lead to the total deforestation of the United States.
Wind turbines need foundations built of hundreds of tons of concrete embedded very deep into the earth, tons of steel, and tons of copper wiring, some of which need to be replaced after a decade and are not easily recycled, Ludwig said. “Things that are supposed to be saving the planet, in reality, they’re just polluting the planet with all sorts of excess materials, resources that could have been better used elsewhere.”
Renewable sources of energy such as wind power and solar power are notoriously unreliable because there are times when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow, Ludwig said. Therefore any electrical power grid which uses solar or wind power needs to include steady reliable forms of energy such as nuclear power, natural gas, oil, or coal.
There is no technology so far that will allow the storing on a mass scale of the energy produced from intermittent sources, Ludwig said.
The electrical grid does not work like a light bulb dimmer, which can accept less power and give less. “It’s much more like a computer or television. If you don’t provide exactly the minimum amount of electricity to the grid that’s required at all times it simply shuts off.”
Attendees walk past a Facebook logo during Facebook Inc’s F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, April 30, 2019. (Reuters/Stephen Lam/File Photo) Censorship & Socialism
Democrats urged Big Tech to step up online censorship or face government regulation during a March 25 congressional hearing with the chief executives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
The lawmakers portrayed the platforms as rife with “disinformation and extremism” that the platforms are unwilling to purge.
“Our nation is drowning in disinformation driven by social media,” said Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, who hosted the hearing.
“The way I see it, there are two faces to each of your platforms,” he said in his opening statement. “Facebook has family and friends neighborhood, but it is right next to the one where there is a white nationalist rally every day.
“YouTube is a place where people share quirky videos, but down the street, anti-vaxxers, COVID deniers, Qanon supporters, and flat-earthers are sharing videos.
“Twitter allows you to bring friends and celebrities into your home, but also Holocaust deniers and terrorists, and worse.”
Bound by the Constitution, Doyle is unable to ban white nationalists or anybody else from organizing rallies, just as he can’t prevent Americans from discussing their opposition to vaccines, questioning the existence of COVID-19—the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus—supporting the anonymous “Q” persona, or believing that the earth is flat.
Doyle said, according to research, “misinformation related to the election” and “COVID disinformation” content was seen billions of times in past months. He acknowledged that the platforms have already taken steps to suppress the content, but called for more.
“You can take this content down, you can reduce the vision, you can fix this, but you choose not to,” he said.
The companies should now brace for regulation, said Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, in his written opening statement.
“It is now painfully clear that neither the market, nor public pressure will force these social media companies to take the aggressive action they need to take to eliminate disinformation and extremism from their platforms,” he said.
“And, therefore, it is time for Congress and this committee to legislate and realign these companies’ incentives to effectively deal with disinformation and extremism.”
It isn’t clear what he would qualify as disinformation and extremism. His office didn’t immediately respond to requests for further details.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), chair of the House Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce, held a similar opinion.
“The regulation we seek should not attempt to limit constitutionally protected free speech, but it must hold platforms accountable when they are used to incite violence and hatred—or as in the case of the COVID pandemic—spread misinformation that costs thousands of lives,” she said in a written statement.
While inciting violence could be illegal, inciting hatred and spreading misinformation generally is constitutionally protected speech. However, opinions vary on what constitutes hate speech and misinformation.
In recent years, Facebook has relied on paid fact-checkers, but there’s evidence that the fact-checkers themselves need to be fact-checked and their operations are politically slanted.
The platforms already prohibit “hate speech,” which is a subjective standard impossible to enforce fairly, according to Nadine Strossen, a law professor and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union.
People on the political left are much more likely to call a variety of statements “hateful,” while those on the right tend to call the same statements “offensive, but not hateful,” a 2017 Cato survey found (pdf).
President Donald Trump speaks to the media after signing a bill for border funding in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, on July 1, 2019. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Donald Trump
Former President Donald Trump on March 25 responded to President Joe Biden’s claims that he had left children to “starve to death” on the Mexican side of the border.
Trump joined “The Ingraham Angle” on Fox News on Thursday to respond to President Biden’s first press conference of his term, which was held earlier that day, following mounting pressure from critics and journalists wondering why Biden was taking so long to hold a briefing.
During the conference, Biden appeared to accuse Trump of leaving migrant children to “starve to death” on the Mexican side of the southern border and vowed that his administration would not do the same.
“If an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let him starve to death and stay on the other side—no previous administration did that either, except Trump. I’m not going to do it,” Biden told reporters.
Trump branded the comments from the Delaware Democrat as completely false and said that the situation at the border currently is “outrageous.”
“First of all, it’s just the opposite,” Trump said. “By the time we finished what we were doing [on the border], very few people were coming up because they knew they weren’t going to get through. We stopped ‘catch and release’, which was a disaster.
“The very biggest thing was, we had the Remain In Mexico policy, and that means that we wouldn’t allow people to wait in our country until they were totally checked out, which most of them didn’t get checked out, and they would go back to their own country.”
“If young kids were with parents, but a lot of times, they weren’t, and we would take care of them, but … what they are doing now is outrageous. And they should finish the wall,” Trump added.
Elsewhere during Thursday’s press conference, Biden blamed the surge at the border—which has seen tens of thousands of illegal aliens attempt to enter the United States—on his predecessor and claimed the vast majority of illegal border-crossers “are being sent back.”
The president defended his decision to reverse the “Remain in Mexico” policy implemented by Trump—a move critics have said has encouraged a surge in illegal immigration.
Biden said it wouldn’t stop the number of people arriving at the border. An ongoing immigration policy tracker by the Heritage Foundation found that Biden has rolled back almost all of Trump’s immigration policies.
A total of 16,513 unaccompanied illegal alien minors were in the custody of either Customs and Border Protection or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as of March 23, according to the HHS Administration for Children and Families.
Biden said there will be a military facility at Fort Bliss in Texas to hold 5,000 beds for unaccompanied minors that would be open this week at the border.
“We’re providing for the space, again, to be able to get these kids out of the Border Patrol facilities, which no child—no one should be in any longer than 72 hours,” he told reporters.
President Joe Biden talks to reporters during the first news conference of his presidency in the East Room of the White House in Washington, on March 25, 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Executive Branch
President Joe Biden, during his solo first press conference Thursday, consulted notes that assisted him with key policy points, data, and appeared to show numbered images of reporters attending the event.
Biden, during his first press conference after more than two months in office, answered questions on topics including whether he will run for reelection, the burgeoning crisis along the border, and abolishing the 60-vote filibuster.
Photos taken at the press briefing show one card with facts about U.S. infrastructure, and another with headshots of what appeared to be the reporters in attendance. The briefing was limited to 25 reporters.
“The United States now ranks 13th globally in infrastructure quality—down from 5th place in 2002,” one bullet point read. The president still corrected himself after mistakenly telling reporters that the United States ranked 85th in the world in infrastructure.
“I still think the majority of the American people don’t like the fact that we are now ranked what, 85th in the world in infrastructure. I mean, look,” the president said, before clarifying: “We rank 13th globally in infrastructure.”
“China spends 3 times more on infrastructure than U.S.,” another bullet point said. The bullet point below noted: “Bridges: More than 1/3 of our bridges (231,000) need repairs or preservation.”
President Joe Biden walks off, holding his notes, after a news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington on, March 25, 2021. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)
At Thursday’s briefing, the president took answers only from a list of reporters whose outlets and names were listed and numbered on a cue card. Biden took 31 questions from reporters, notably ignoring those from Fox News and The New York Times.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.
The president was also asked about whether he plans on running for reelection, which comes as members of the media have speculated and questioned why he hasn’t held a formal White House press conference in more than two months.
“My plan is to run for reelection,” he said at the White House, adding that he has “no idea” about whether he will run against former President Donald Trump. Biden said he expects Vice President Kamala Harris to join him on a potential ticket.
Trump in November 2019 referred to a notebook with handwritten notes during a press briefing at his first impeachment hearing.
